Parlando: The COC Blog

9/28/2011

No Exit: Rigoletto's Abuse of Power

[Tonight is the opening night of Rigoletto! Here's an excerpt from an article in Prelude by Gianmarco Segato detailing director Christopher Alden and designer Michael Levine's vision for Verdi's masterpiece.]

The world we enter in Verdi’s Rigoletto is a nasty one: a male-dominated society in which women are merely pawns used to boost the abusive and absolute power of the ruling Duke. Christopher Alden, who directed the COC’s highly acclaimed production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, will bring an appropriately dark and probing vision to his new production of Verdi’s masterpiece this fall. “Often people are dulled to what the true intent of a piece is by decades of seeing it done in a comfortable way,” Alden says. “I try to get at something which does get back to the original kick that the piece had when it was first performed.”

There is good reason to believe that Verdi would have been onside with Alden’s approach. He was highly enthusiastic about the source for his Rigoletto, Victor Hugo’s incendiary 1832 drama Le roi s’amuse, which he called the “greatest subject and perhaps the greatest drama of all modern times.” Verdi would have been attracted to Hugo’s belief that art could incite revolution and correct social inequalities, but in choosing such a subject, he faced major hurdles in attempting to turn the play into an opera. The play’s intermingling of politics and sex and its savage attack on the monarchy and the decadent aristocracy created a scandal at its Paris premiere, setting off a riot and causing it to close after only one performance.

. . .

Canadian designer Michael Levine, who provided the critically-acclaimed visuals for the COC productions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with Symphony of Psalms, worked with Alden to restore to Rigoletto some of the elements that made it so controversial at the time of its premiere. They are setting the opera in Verdi’s own time: a hard-bitten Victorian world dominated by men, those highly-successful mavens of the Industrial Revolution for whom wealth and power were the ultimate goal and whose less-than-savoury public lives were strictly separate from the domestic realm. The setting is an opulent Victorian men’s club, all polished mahogany and thick oriental carpets: the trappings of an exclusive, privileged, closed, male society. The club will function as a kind of “no exit” court into which women are dropped and trapped as playthings for its members. Costumes (also by Levine) will be traditionally Victorian with full-skirted frock coats and formal evening attire for the men; décolleté, flounced gowns for the loose-moraled Maddalena and more appropriately restrained high-necked dresses for Rigoletto’s saintly daughter, Gilda.

Within this harsh environment, the character of Rigoletto is very much the middle-class working man whose job it is to be cruel and mocking. He is always there behind the Duke, encouraging his master to exert his power by seizing what is not rightfully his – that is – his own courtiers’ women. The Victorian separation of work and home is made manifestly clear in Rigoletto’s situation: the one ray of light in his life is his precious daughter Gilda whom he shields from the horrors of the Duke’s debauched realm by literally holding her prisoner in her own home. She is the quintessential Victorian “Angel in the House” – a paragon of womanhood who must be sheltered from the corruption of the outside world. However, as Alden makes clear, Rigoletto will learn a hard lesson in the impossibility of maintaining such a strictly compartmentalized life. Gilda eventually finds a way to break out of her oppressive home environment, with devastating consequences for herself and her father.

Acclaim for Iphigenia in Tauris

Everyone's Excited about Susan Graham

Iphigenia in Tauris opens tonight, and we're lucky to be featuring the singer whom conductor Pablo Heras-Casado called "the Iphigenia of this decade:" Susan Graham.

The Globe and Mailspoke to Susan Graham, and she discusses her perspective on the character of Iphigenia:

“I’ve talked with Robert [Carsen] a lot about this” – this is their fourth revival together since the production debuted in Chicago in 2006 – “and our assumption is that Iphigénie is a classic case of arrested development,” Graham says. “She was ripped from her father, from her mother and brother, and there’s a certain amount of naïveté and trauma there. Many years later, she’s a grown woman, but with the sheltered sensibility of a young girl.” [read the full interview]

NOW Magazine also has a Q&A with our star, in which she reveals her favourite trouser role.

In this interview with the Toronto Sun, she likens singing Iphigenia to therapy: “I love this opera. I enjoy playing the depths of these traumatized characters. It’s a great opportunity to dig deep. It’s cheaper than an analyst’s couch, and a lot more fun.”

Emerging Art Productions has a blog preview of Iphigenia in Tauris! Go check it out.

Also, we have new photos of the production! Take a look at them on Facebook or flickr.